Over the years, numerous initiatives that sought to find alien civilizations have appeared around the world. These groups benefit from powerful telescopes and transmitters and constantly broadcast messages that contain our location into deep-space. But for a while, some voices have been arguing that the codes sent into the vastness are too complex for alien civilizations to decipher and that they should be made simpler. This is exactly what a team of researchers did. They argue that any potential alien with a bit of mathematical training and knowledge of astronomy can crack it, Wired reports.

The new code was designed by geoscientist Michael Busch, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and colleague Rachel Reddick, a physicist based at the Stanford University. The duo published the new study in the Friday online issue of the scientific journal arXiv. In the entry, the two wrote that very little attention has been paid in the past to “ensuring that a transmitted message will be understandable to an alien listener.” They argue that neither the 1974 Arecibo message, nor the 1993/2003 Cosmic Calls were properly tested for sense before they were beamed away.

This is one of the main reasons why the team decided to take the task of developing a brand new code all by itself. The algorithms themselve... (read more)